Which PPC Keyword To Use?

So you’re thinking about using PPC to drive some traffic to your blog pages, or to a mini-site you’ve created.

Which keywords to you choose?

There are two aspects to that question. One is what keywords will get you good placement for low cost (e.g. low competition keywords). I’ve written about that before. Another aspect is what keywords Google thinks your page is about.

We can use Google’s keyword tool to get some insight into that last part of the question, and a start on good keywords to check for the first part.

Go to the tool and you’ll see the initial opening screen, something like this:

This is what I’ve shown before, to do keyword research on possible keywords to determine competition. This time, though, we want to click the radio button labeled “Website Content” (circled in red above).

This allows us to type in the URL of a web page instead of a keyword. Google then goes out to that web page and examines it to figure out what keywords it’s about, and then shows you the statistics for those and related keywords.

This is most beneficial when done on specific landing pages, as a start to identifying good keywords to target for PPC. If you find that the keywords you thought you were targeting don’t come up, then you might need to look at your on-page SEO a bit more closely.

Using the keyword tool in this way is a nice shortcut for identifying secondary keywords to bid on when using PPC to drive traffic to a mini-site. I’m sure you’ve already identified your primary keyword using other means, but secondary keywords can often have lower competition and drive a significant amount of new traffic to your site.